The Radicalism of Modernity

A friend pointed me to this wonderful physics video. I've only watched the first few minutes so far - the whole thing is almost five hours long! It looks like it will be a delightfully informative five hours! Already at the beginning, from 4:00 to 5:00, a fundamental concept of physics is presented. If we want to get to the fundamental, essential laws of nature, we should take as a starting point an isolated, clean, pure state, a vacuum. I have the impression that the video will be showing us a state that is even cleaner and purer than a vacuum! But I want to head in a different direction.

The Copernican revolution shifted the center of the universe, the perspective from which we can access the essential laws of nature, from the earth to the sun. Giordano Bruno was more profoundly revolutionary: he proposed that the universe does not have a center!

I would like to propose a similar scientific revolution. The center being debated by Ptolemy and Copernicus and Bruno is a location in space. The starting point that Richard Behiel is referring to in the video is not a location in space but a state of matter, in particular a state of absence of matter. From a vacuum, the fundamental, essential laws of nature become apparent. Purity reveals essence. I want to argue that purity is not any particular state. It is true that some situations have a kind of purity that allows clearer revelations of natural law. But there are very many such pure situations, each revealing their own particular species of natural law. There is no uniquely pure situation, no uniquely essential natural law.

I first understood this from reading the book Elementary Excitations in Solids by David Pines. The pure situation here is a crystal, a regular arrangement of atoms. In a crystal, the sorts of elementary particles one finds are different from those found in a vacuum. The most basic such particle is a phonon, the quantum unit of a sound wave. There is no sound in a vacuum!

Our starting points for causal analyses are very diverse. If my automobile engine is mis-firing and I want to understand why, to trace the causal chain back to the big bang through the supernovas that created the metal atoms that condensed to form the earth from which the ore was extracted to allow the casting of the engine block that is mis-firing... however accurate this analysis might be, its complexity is not likely to point me to the need to replace the spark plugs! Instead, the pure state that I should start with would be a properly functioning engine. I can then look at how a disruption to that pure state, e.g. fouled spark plugs, can lead to observed effects like mis-firing.

Physics is the cornerstone scientific discipline, and science is the cornerstone discipline of modern times. The idea that an isolated clean state is the purity on which our analyses should be founded, this is the radicalism that becomes translated onto the political plane. The French Revolution is the paradigm case. The calendar and the units of measure were restructured from rational principles, cut off from tradition. The isolated clean starting point is remote from the tangled web of our immediate experience. We have prioritized what is distant over what is near.

This is not a sustainable approach to managing the world. What we neglect inevitably declines. If that decline really matters, we will generally pick up the pain signal, turn our attention to the decline, and take corrective action. But if we have a strong bias, if we are wearing blinkers that restrict our analyses to remote perspectives, our lack of attention can allow the decline to intensify to the point where it becomes much more difficult to correct.

We can think of earth as just one planet among many: this is a perspective that prioritizes the remote. From this perspective, what happens on earth is not very important. If we think of earth as our home, as our life support system, then what happens on earth is not so remote. It becomes important to look for ways to correct any declines we might observe; it becomes important to pay attention to any possible declines.

A physics-based approach to healthcare is also problematic. We can think of human functioning as some kind of swirling bag of chemicals. A human being is very far from the clean pure state of a vacuum! We can try to understand a disease as a pattern of biochemical reactions, but just to understand health as a pattern of biochemical reactions is already a challenge that is beyond our forseeable grasp. But we can shift our perspective to health as itself a pure state, and study the natural laws that are revealed from that perspective. It's not that the biochemical perspective is wrong - my point is that the biochemical perspective is not uniquely right. There are many sorts of pure states, each providing a perspective that can reveal natural laws specific to it.

Looking at Jupiter through a telescope, one can see its moons orbiting around it. Jupiter and its moons form an orbital system. It is natural to take Jupiter as the center of the universe when studying the orbits of its moons. In just this way, the pure system which can be disrupted, the effects of whose disruptions we can observe: what we should see as a pure system will depend on the problems that we are encountering. If we can remain sensitive to problems and able to shift perspectives so we can analyze problems relative to a normal functioning, where that relationship connects to our ability to respond, then our analyses can empower us to steer away from disaster.

Computing Sustainability

What does it mean for an activity to be sustainable? Just that it can be continued for a long time!

There are many facets to be unpacked here. What's a long time? If my guitar has good sustain, it means that I can play a note and hold it for maybe ten seconds. When looking at the sustainability of fossil fuel combustion, the time horizon is more in the zone of a century.

What is going to put a stop to the activity? The vibrating string on my guitar just diminishes gradually and then goes silent. Looking at the nuclear weapons strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, the main concern about its sustainability is the possibility of global nuclear annihilation. Looking at the whaling industry, the main concern is the extinction of whales of whatever species.

There are two aspects to the cessation of the activity. We might rely on that activity, and so we will suffer when the activity stops. If the activity stops because the activity has caused enough of a disaster that it is no longer possible to continue the activity, we may well suffer directly from that disaster.

What puts a stop to an activity might not be a consequence of the activity. I like to go hiking through the vacant lots on the hillside to the north of our house. Around here the vacant lots are getting developed quite rapidly. In a few years, I will no longer be able to hike through those lots. My hiking activity is not sustainable, but not as any consequence of the hiking itself.

What's the scope of the activity? Lots of people might be doing the same sort of thing. Or other people might be doing something similar. Fossil fuel combustion is an activity with a rich scope. I drive my car a few hours a week to shop, meet friends, etc. This activity of me driving my car, that has negligible impact on the global environment. But around the world, billions of people are similarly driving their cars a few hours a week. The total impact of everybody driving, that is considerable. And then fossil fuel combustion also includes coal and gas burning power plants, ocean freighters, jet airliners, gas powered residential furnaces, oil fueled industrial boilers, etc. When I consider the sustainability of my driving habits, it makes sense to see this activity as an instance of a larger pattern, and to think about the sustainability of the larger pattern. It's not like everyone else is going to stop driving just so I can continue!

To decide how sustainable an activity is, that involves predicting the future. My hiking is not sustainable because those vacant lots will be developed. But that is my prediction of the future! Maybe those lots won't get developed!

Long term sustainability of activities embedded in complex systems: this sort of puzzle is really unsolvable in any definitive way. It might seem clear enough that, between the depletion of fossil fuel resources and the climate consequences of CO2 emissions, our driving habits are not sustainable in the long run. But maybe fusion power will come to the rescue, with electric vehicles taking over, and we can continue our happy motoring lifestyle. Some sort of scenario analysis needs to be brought in. To know what the future will look like is impossible. But we can more practically sketch out some manageable number of scenarios, combinations of gross features of our ways of living. Looking at the sustainability of whatever activity, we can evaluate that against each scenario. The answer will be relative to the scenario.

Digital electronic computing is a vast and diverse activity in the world these days. How sustainable is it? What might put a stop to it? Probably some amount of computing will continue for a long time, if only at a small scale. But, could the dominance of computing in our society be toppled? How could that happen?

One plausible future scenario is that climate change continues as people continue to burn fossil fuels as long as possible. People stop large scale burning of fossil fuels because climate change destroys our industrial capabilities. Could we continue computing if lose the industrial capability for mining coal etc.? An aspect of computing that is not so visible is the way digital electronic microchips are made. This involves massive technological investment. We will only be able to make computers, and hence be able to compute, if our industrial and technological capabilities are maintained at quite a high level. Certainly if there is just a blip for a few years, computers are quite durable so there needn't be an interruption in our computing capability. But if chip manufacture fails for decades, the impact will be massive.

The unsustainability of computing due to the collapse of our industrial capability, this can be like the unsustainability of my hiking because the vacant lots got developed. My hiking is no causal factor in the development of the vacant lots. Similarly, the collapse of industrial capability could be a result of factors entirely different than computing, e.g. fossil fuel combustion and climate change. But it could also be that computing contributes to its own demise.

Computing could cause its own demise quite directly. We are already seeing the pollution of the web from all kinds of computationally created dangers. Spam, misinformation, fraud, viruses, fishing... the list is constantly growing. The web could get to be so dangerous that usage declines dramatically. The economics of chip manufacturing requires huge volume in order to amortize the huge investment in design and process development. If the demand for hardware declines, the unit cost will rise, further reducing the volume. This can become a vicious cycle that could have massive impact.

A less direct causal path, whereby computing contributes to its own demise, is where computing weakens society, and the weakened society can no longer adequately support the computational infrastructure. A very simple example would be how people lose the ability to do mathematics without digital electronic support, and thus lose the capability to debug software. A more complex example would be where the political polarization driven by misinformation in social media etc. leads to the destruction of universities so there are no more engineers to maintain chip manufacturing facilities. A yet more complex example would be where that political polarization prevents effective response to climate change, which leads to the collapse of our industrial capabilities, including chip manufacturing.

Whether any of these rather wild scenarios could come to pass... Yogi Berra had it right: nothing is harder to predict than the future!

Narrowing the Range

Here is a new piece in 53edo. This is another attempt to create a kleisma traversal. Yesterday I posted a first attempt, whose score did not look like a kleisma traversal. I looked back at the code, and it sure looks like the system had been initialized to a kleisma traversal. So the most likely thing would be that I jostled the system at too high a temperature which erased the kleisma traversal, and then as I brought the temperature down a different structure spontaneously emerged.

To test this hypothesis, I used the same rhythmic structure and the same initialization of pitch values, but just set the temperature near the phase transition and jostled the system at that relatively cool temperature.

Here is a score of the piece. The 32 varying repetitions have been folded on top of each other. The vertical axis is the pitch classes, ordered by minor thirds. I.e. each row is the pitch class one minor third above the pitch class below it. This score looks exactly like a kleisma traversal. There is a gradual ramp from the beginning of each 80 second measure, moving up 6 minor thirds, which then wraps over to the beginning of the next measure but a perfect fifth higher. There is a whole band of pitch classes that is absent: a kleisma traversal has no business visiting all the pitch classes of the tuning. It just needs to follow a path to the tempered out comma, in this case the kleisma.

This brings up another facet of the puzzle of yesterday's piece. This piece did cover all the pitch classes. It looked a bit like a schisma traversal, but that shouldn't cover all the pitch classes either. So I suspect the structure that emerged was some kind of compound comma traversal. I have code to initialize a system with a pattern like that... but how to detect it once it has emerged... I don't know quite how to do that!

Here is another score for the piece, but with the rows reordered so now each row is a perfect fifth above the row below it. There is no helical structure here at all: the dense regions don't connect to form any sort of path. This shows that the piece is not any kind of schisma traversal.

Bug or Feature?

Here is a new piece in 53edo. My intent was for this to be a traversal of the kleisma comma, repeated 32 times with variations. I'm not too sure what I actually got!

The idea behind the thermodynamic approach I use in my software is that order can emerge spontaneously. I use unusual tunings; my hope is that this kind of spontaneous order can reveal some of the potential of these tunings. There is one significant challenge though: is the order that can be discovered in the output something that I introduced accidentally, or is is truly spontaneous?

I often do introduce a simple structure into the system I am simulating, and try to preserve that order. In these cases, I just hope that the variations will reveal additional order around that structure. In the piece here, I initialized the system with a traversal of the kleisma comma along one axis of the system. The variations can then emerge in the other dimensions.

I use various types of graphs or scores in trying to see what sort of order might be present in the output. The graph above is a simple score for the piece. Time is on the horizontal axis, in seconds. Pitch class is on the vertical axis: the pitches in the piece are all folded into a single octave, so the vertical axis runs from 0 to 52. The graph looks a bit like a coarsely woven fabric. Since the topology of the system is 32 repetitions of an 80 second measure, folding all the repetitions together might make the order more clear:

It's clear that the measures share some sort of structure, but it's not so clear what the order is. There is a vague sort of staircase structure, so it looks a bit like a comma traversal. It's pretty surprising that almost all the pitch classes are present. A simple comma traversal doesn't need so many pitch classes!

The kleisma comma is dominated by minor thirds. Six minor thirds is very close to a perfect fifth, and in 53edo they are exactly the same (modulo octaves). So I had the idea of shuffling the pitch classes. This graph has the same rows as the previous graph, but instead of ordering the pitch classes in a sort of chromatic way, just climbing microstep by microstep, in these graph each row is a pitch class a minor third above the pitch class below it. Horizontal stripes appear in this graph, with a period of about 6 rows. These are the perfect fifths. But if this was a kleisma traversal, there should just be a few stripes that angle very slightly so they change height by 6 rows from one side to the other; the right side of this graph wraps over to the left side, so the traversal should look like a helix. This graph has a strongly helical shape, but it is very steep. I don't think I ended up with a kleisma traversal! But all those stripes of a perfect fifth...

Here the rows are ordered so each row is a perfect fifth above the row immediately below it. There are about six stripes that gradually rise from left to right, wrapping to the next stripe to form a helix. Ah, this looks like a traversal of the schisma. With a schisma, eight perfect fifths plus a major third bring one back to the starting point (again, modulo octaves).

My intent was to produce a traversal of the kleisma, but I got instead a traversal of the schisma. I need to go back to my code... did I bungle the initialization? Or maybe I jostled too much, the initialization got erased, and the schisma traversal emerged spontaneously. Either way, when I listen to the piece, it sounds pretty good to my ears!